request for new feature

[Harold L Hunt II]

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 12:03:37PM -0400, Harold L Hunt II wrote:
> 
>>Alexander Gottwald wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Harold L Hunt II wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>>  /* we must build this string with information about mount points */
>>>>>  const char* command = "c:\\cygwin\\usr\\x11r6\\xterm.exe -display 
>>>>>  :0.0";
>>>>
>>>>That line and comment are really the crux of my whole argument.  It is 
>>>>simple to spawn a process.  It is not necessarily so simple to use a 
>>>>non-hardcoded path to the executables
>>>
>>>
>>>The code from cygpath has a conversion unix_path->windows_path.
>>>
>>
>>No, I mean we have to find the path that XWin.exe was started from so 
>>that we can find xterm.  We can't just hardcode c:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin.
> 
> 
> Why is this an issue?  Why can't you just add "/usr/X11R6/bin" to your
> PATH?  There is no need to convert pathnames to windows format.  Cygwin
> does that for you.
> 

Depends on if we use Cygwin's fork or Window's CreateProcess.  We 
haven't made that decision yet.

> 
>>>>, nor is it so easy to ensure that 
>>>>zombie consoles are not created in the process.
>>>
>>>
>>>They'll die when the xserver kills the connection. Otoh there are a lot of
>>>options (esp. the PROCESS_GROUP things) which control such process 
>>>inheritance.
>>>
>>
>>That's not what I meant.  What I meant was we don't want 10 little 
>>console windows, one for each of the xterms that we started up.  Thus, 
>>we may either need to call 'run.exe', or we may need to do what 
>>'run.exe' does internally.
> 
> 
> If xwin has any kind of console attached to it, you won't see the
> extra consoles windows.  There is code in cygwin (fhandler_tty.cc) for
> creating invisible console windows on NT, fwiw.
> 
> 
>>>Lets see if someone builds these (in my opinion useless) things.
>>
>>I think that having a non-hardcoded path and no useless console windows 
>>are essential.  I wouldn't distribute a version that didn't have those 
>>two things.
> 
> 
> I agree that these are two crucial goals for this.  It should be flexible
> and it shouldn't have those annoying console popups.  Not that my opinion
> matters in this case...
> 
> cgf